Hacking your lead-gen with reminders

So after implementing my last lesson, you’ve now gotten your Feedbin account setup and are starting to see dozens of leads daily. Congrats.

You now have a system for finding, qualifying, and prioritizing great projects that’s more advanced than 99% of design firms.

This daily flow of leads is enough to fill the gaps in most pipelines. Next I want to show you the cherry on top.

Infrequent and ad-hoc opportunity sourcing

Below is going to be a list of quick-hitting pro-tips to make your entire system sing with profitability.

We’re going to break up the grind of automation through reminders for niche and ad-hoc opportunities.

With job boards covered, you have a big portion of the web’s UX design opportunities coming to you.

However, there’s a few more places that are worth your time – outside of the job board spectrum.

Hacker News

Once a month, Hacker News has a freelance hiring frenzy known as the monthly “Seeking Freelancer” thread. This is where startups from Ycombinator and other places come to look for contract-based help.

It’s usually a really high-quality source of opportunities because people on hacker news are typically focused on solving interesting problems and have realistic budgets and expectations (as is possible).

Most of these posts will simply ask you to email them so there’s very little barrier to entry. A friendly, well-worded email can mean thousands of dollars in project work.

On the other hand, this isn’t a good candidate for Feedbin because there’s no RSS feed to track these threads.

What I recommend instead is setting up a monthly reminder (Basecamp’s automatic questions feature is good for this) that will remind you to check at the start of each month.

This will let you stay on top of these great opportunities without having to remember by yourself.

It’s a strategy I recommend for a few other sites too. Let’s quickly walk through a few more reminders that are worth setting up:

Check Facebook for design RFPs once a week

Check Google for design RFPs once a week

Check Lever and Workable for posts with the word freelance once a week

Check Slack communities for referrals daily

Check Subreddits that post work once a month

Setup Google alerts for project keywords

Hopefully you’re beginning to see how a combination of email alerts, automatically curated RSS feeds, and one-off reminders can come together to create an infinitely powerful source of work that will supercharge your design firm’s outbound lead-generation.

There’s one last thing I’ve left out. The email line that’s client repellent on all of these websites.